First six-monthly periodic report

PLANET II

SZTAKI participated in a successful proposal of PLANET II. PLANET II is the continuation of PLANET – the European Network of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence Planning sponsored by EC. It is the coordinating organisation for European research and development in the field of Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling and in particular aims to promote the transfer of this leading-edge technology into European industry.

PLANET II is sponsored by the Commission for a period of 2 years with an overall budget of 500.000 Euro. Its activity is closely related to Key Action 2 of the IST programme, which addresses new methods of work (including e-work) and e-commerce. Hence, members of PLANET II focus on the exploitation of planning and scheduling technology in this area.

Nodes of PLANET are European universities, research centres, and industrial companies working in the

field of Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling. Currently, PLANET has 47 nodes from 13 European countries.

IMS NOE

SZTAKI took part in the successful Network of Excellence proposal on Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS NOE). Moreover, SZTAKI is the leader of the subgroup on Manufacturing Scheduling and Control in the Extended Enterprise.

The main medium-term goals of the NOE are: to strengthen the European involvement in the world-wide IMS community; provide a stimulating and high-quality forum for discussion, exchange of ideas, planning for collaboration and debates about trends, research and further developments of IMS concepts; provide a Web-based Benchmarking Service for the research and industrial community; provide a Technology Observatory to elaborate and update at regular intervals Technology Roadmaps and Expertise Maps within the Network's scope at European level; to anticipate the EU's scientific and technological needs in order to help the EU to react rapidly to new scientific and technological developments.

VIMIMS

SZTAKI took part in the SOCRATES-MINERVA Program of the European Union with the successful proposal: VIVIMS: Virtual Institute for the Modelling of Industrial Manufacturing Systems.

The main objective of the project is to establish a Virtual Institute specifically focused on knowledge sharing and integration of competencies in the educational and research area of Modelling and Design of Industrial Manufacturing Systems (MIMS). The adoption of ICT tools will be functional to a first reorganisation of the current learning process, by integrating conventional modes with the most innovative approaches based on ODL.

E-Factory DNA

SZTAKI - as the member of the Scientific Committee in the E-Factory DNA EUREKA Cluster Project on Products, Processes, Enterprises for competitiveness and sustainability of European Manufacturing Industry towards globalisation and new economy.

ERCIM WORKING GROUP ON CONSTRAINTS

SZTAKI joined, as a full member of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), the so-named ERCIM Working Group on Constraints.

Constraints have recently emerged as a research area that combines researchers from a number of fields, including Artificial Intelligence, Programming Languages, Symbolic Computing and Computational Logic. Current research in this area deals with various foundational issues, with implementation aspects and with new applications of constraint programming. Our main concern is in this area in the application of the constraint technology to large-scale combinatorial optimization problems with industrial background such as process planning, production planning, scheduling.

The WG brings ERCIM researchers together , involved in research on the subject of Constraints. Its aims are to promote research on this subject within the ERCIM institutions, facilitate the exchange of information, coordinate efforts in technology transfer, and facilitate the exchange of researchers for short and long visits.The ERCIM WG on Constraints has at the moment 15 member institutes.

Regarding Workpackage D: Organising Workshops, Conferences and scientific meetings:
IEA/AIE-2001 Conference, Budapest, 4-7. June, 2001
IEA/AIE-2001 -- The Fourteenth International Conference on Industrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems was held during 4-7. June 2001, in Budapest, Hungary. The conference covered all main research areas and many application domains of Artifical Intelligence. General chair of IEA/AIE-2001 was Moonis Ali, program chair and co-chair were László Monostori (from SZTAKI) and Soundar Kumara, respectively. Local chair was József Váncza (from SZTAKI). The conference was organized by SZTAKI, in co-operation with a number of international scientific societies e.g. the International Society of Applied Intelligence (ISAI), AAAI, ACM/SIGART, ECCAI, ERCIM to name but a few.
The Call for Papers announcement attracted many researchers and engineers from all over the world. A total of 104 papers -- representing 21 countries and all continents -- were selected for presentation. Accepted papers covered all main research areas of AI and many different application domains. The conference had 113 participants from 30 countries.
The plenary talk of the conference was given by Tibor Vámos (SZTAKI) on "Triple R: Representation, Retrieval, Reasoning". Technical presentations were held in 2-3 parallel tracks in sessions on search, knowledge representation, model-based reasoning, machine learning, data mining, soft computing, evolutionary algorithms, distributed problem solving, expert systems, pattern and speech recognition, vision, language processing, planning and scheduling, robotics, autonomous agents, design, control, manufacturing systems, finance and business, software engineering, and tutoring.
Proceedings of IEA/AIE-2001 were released by Springer Verlag under the title "Engineering of Intelligent Systems" in the series of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI 2070). Electronic access to the papers of the volume is possible at http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/tocs/t2070.htm.

Extended versions of selected papers are considered for publication in the International Journal of Applied Intelligence. The conference’s home page is at http://www.sztaki.hu/conferences/ieaaie2001/.

Regarding Workpackage E: Visits to another research centre:
Name: József Váncza

Dates: 18-20. June, 2001

Visited partner institution: Sixth Annual Workshop of the ERCIM Working Group on Constraints, Charles University, Prague

Report attached

Workpackage progress report for Workpackage No.: 8
Virtual Laboratory for EE, VE

PLANET networking

WE had been working on the development of our CIM Research Laboratory to open co-operation means for exploiting the Extended Enterprise research theme, the Virtual Enterprise theme and the related themes for internationally accessible resources. Our visiting professors from Germany and from France were of a great help in launching this program. Their final reports are attached.

The purchase of up-to-date peripherals for the VE research was a great step forward..

We organized and prepared the MIM IFAC Workshop in early August.

Many scientific papers were developed and submitted.

Heavy preparatory work was devoted to the IFIP PROLAMAT Conference to take part in November.

Proposals were prepared and submitted.

PLANET II proposal prepared

Joining ERCIM WG on Constraints Report attached

Organisation of the IEA/AIE-2001 Conference, Budapest, 4-7. June, 2001

Workpackage progress report for Workpackage No.:9
Group Decision Support Systems

Laboratory of Operations Research and Decision Systems Head: Tamas Rapcsak

1.) The annual General Assembly meeting of the Hungarian Operational Research Society (HORS) held on the 25^th of May, at the Conference Room of the Institute. The meeting was followed by a half-day-workshop to celebrate the 10-year-long existence of the HORS. 10 lectures were held giving a general insight into the present situation of operations research in Hungary and abroad, then, some application summaries were

provided.

2.) Visiting professor:
31. August: lecture held by Prof. George Isac (Dept. of Mathematics, Royal Military College of Canada) with the title "Nuclearity for convex cones, Pareto efficiency and Ekeland type variational principle". One of his outstanding books referred to is titled "Topological methods in complementarity theory" (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). In this lecture the notions of nuclear cone, full nuclear cone and pseudo-nuclear cone were presented, furthermore, several results related to them were given. The main goal was to apply the nuclearity to the Pareto efficiency and to show some interesting relations with Ekeland's variational principle. By using the nuclearity, a geometrical aspect of Ekeland principle was shown. Applying the nuclearity in product spaces, a new variant of Ekeland principle for vector valued mappings was obtained.

Workpackage progress report for Workpackage No.: 10

Distributed Digital Library

(Department of Distributed Systems)
Activities performed at the Department (www.sztaki.hu/dsd)

1 EU project” StreamOfTheFly” contract negotiation and preparation

accepted, possible start date the 1^st of Dec 2001

2. EDEN (European Democracy Electronic Network) EU proposal under preparation (NAS proposal)

3. Managing the global Web page for the HUNG-TING

4. EUTIST-AMI EU cluster contract negotiation accepted, possible start date the 1^st of Dec 2001

5. planning for infrastructure for videoconferencing

6. PublicVoiceXML project proposal submission IST 2001 34546

7. VASP project proposal submission IST

8. GENESYS project proposal submission IST

9. IT3 project proposal submission IST

10. PhD. thesis for Andras Micsik- on Web based collaborative working methods

11. WWW 2003 (World Wide Web World Congress) in Budapest 2003 kick-of meeting for IPC


Workpackage progress report for Workpackage No.: WP11

IS Technologies, BPR and SW quality improvements
Workshops on BPR and SW Quality were organized, and program is appended.
Workpackage progress report for Workpackage No.:WP12

Laboratory for Intelligent Road Vehicle Systems, control with vision in the loop
Regarding Workpackage B:
Euro-conform complex retraining of specialists in road transport, 14/06/01 (Presentations on Research on modelling and control of vehicle dynamics)

Regarding Workpackage C: Foreign visitors at SZTAKI, virtual laboratories:

Prof. Gary Balas, University of Minnesota, USA, 23-27/07/01 (Fault detection in LPV systems)

Prof. I.T. Cameron The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, 16-26/05/01 (Process Modelling and Model Analysis)

Prof. F. Szigeti , University of Merida, Venezuela, 01/04/01 – 08/09/01 (Fault detection, Mathematical systems theory)

Prof. C. E. Vera, University of Caracas, Venezuela, 27/06/01 – 08/09/01 (Mathematical systems theory)

Prof. Juan Cardillo, University of Merida, Venezuela, 01/07/01 – 31/07/01 (Theory and control of discrete event systems)

Prof Paul Van den Hof, Delft University of Technology , 21-23/05/01 (System identification)

Prof. G.L. Gissinger, Universite de haute Alsace, Mulhouse, 9-15/06/01 (Vehicle dynamics, Chassis comfort)

Prof. L. Dugard, Laboratoire d’Automatique de Grenoble, 9-15/06/01 (Vehicle dynamics, Control of suspensions)

Prof. R. Verschoore, Ghent University, Belgium, 9-15/06/01 (Comfort of land vehicles)

Regarding Workpackage D: Organising Workshops, Conferences and scientific meetings:
2nd Ph.D. Workshop on Systems and Control, Balatonfüred, Hungary, 17-19. September, 200l

Regarding Workpackage E: Visits to another research centre:

Prof. J. Bokor, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA, 22. April 24 – 24. May, 200l (Approximative identification)

B. Kulcsár, I. Szászi, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA, 25. April – 3. May, 200l (Detection filter design)

Edelmayer A., University of Tolouse, France, 25. April – 2. May, 200l – (Inversion based fault detection and isolation)

Prof. J. Bokor, P. Gáspár, Z. Szabó, University of Porto, European Control Conference, Porto, Portugal, 03/09/01 – 12/09/01 (Loop shaping design)

G. Stikkel, Montreal, Canada, 8-22/07/01 (Signal processing)

Prof. K. Hangos, Queensland University, Brisbane, Australia, 01/10/01 – 31/10/01 (Process modelling)

Prof. K. Hangos, G. Szederkényi, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia, 25-30/06/01 (Diagnosis of non-linear process systems)

Appendix: BIONICS a transatlantic research program

Bionics

Bio-inspired Information Technologies

- a transatlantic research program